


Fire's Touch

by iwakehungryaftersoundsleep



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, Healing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 19:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5797126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwakehungryaftersoundsleep/pseuds/iwakehungryaftersoundsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke runs from her memories and her loved ones and everything she has known to save her sanity.  Slowly, she remembers that there is more to being alive than survival, and there is more to her than the hurt she has caused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire's Touch

When Clarke awakens in the dark of night, her chest heaving and her body salted with sweat, she wishes she could set the world on fire and force the dawn to rise early.

But there has been too much burning already. Too many bodies incinerating in the atmosphere like hundreds of shooting stars that won’t grant wishes. Too many villages bombed and spaceships combusting. Too much skin charred by burning air. Too many bridges blown to return. To many bodies destroyed in the blaze.

Her heartbeat slows. The empty stares that haunt her recede, and there is only the stars above and the chatter of the forest. There is only the wet in the air, and she focuses all her energy on breathing it in.

She bathes every morning in an ice-melt. In the water, she is weightless. The cold presses her, stabs her, and she slowly loses feeling in her fingers and toes. She drinks it, ignores the healer in her that categorizes possible toxins, blocks out the education and the statistics they filled her with. She drinks, and the possible poison in the water slips down and freezes the cavities of her chest. Refreshing.

If Clarke’s cold enough, if she’s wet enough, maybe she’ll stop feeling charred at the edges. The part of her that’s still awake, that’s still working away at the corners of her mind, hopes so. The rest of her focuses on finding meat.

 

Clarke stalks the forest with carefully light feet. They aren’t the feet she was born with. Those feet were echoing smacks on metal, a drumbeat of movement.

These are the careful, quiet feet she learned in the footsteps of another.

Clarke’s foot arches like Her’s did. Clarke’s calves have grown long and lean like Her’s were, the inheritance of a hostile Earth. Clarke’s body has stilled and strengthened like Her’s was. Clark moves like She did, like a warrior. Like she belongs.

Perhaps love is muscle memory. You can unlearn the trust and the faith, but you can’t unlearn the feeling of moving together in a silent forest. You can’t unlearn the heel first, the way the balls of the feet roll forward and then launch off of the toe. You can’t unlearn the touches that bring pleasure. You can’t unlearn the pain; not here, not on this Earth, not where pain is the only real teacher.

Clarke hunts. Clarke climbs. Clarke stabs. At least this death, she imparts with her own hand. At least this death is a fair fight. At least this time Clarke is face to face with her victims.

When the panther is dead, Clarke bows, and then carefully selects a place to vomit. She always vomits after killing, and her stomach acid burns her throat as it spills out of her. It hurts to kill, and pain is the only real teacher.

 

Clarke survives. Early spring turns into summer, and the heat forces her forward. She eats and hunts and trades and retreats to the stillness and silence of the forest. She survives, though sometimes she thinks she deserves death, because it’s all she knows how to do.

Once, during the height of august, she breaks through mountaintop brush into a cliffside clearing and stares across the valleys and hills. Somewhere, beyond, is Arcadia and everyone she left behind. Her eyes don’t attempt to pick it out. Instead, she stares out at the green as the sun rises in the sky and it blends into blue-green-yellow shadow, and her heart skips a beat.

She screams.

The birds explode from the trees, chattering wildly. Clarke pauses for a moment before moving on to escape the trouble she has surely attracted.

Her eyes drink in this world, this beautiful, vivacious, deadly world. She laughs, and for a moment her heart feels full.

 

The next week, Clarke follows a white moth almost a mile, dancing behind it, running from rock to stream to shade as she sees the world through its eyes. Her heart flutters in time to its wings.

Two days after that, she finds a fossil with a perfect fish, and instead of throwing it back, she brings it to her cave and puts it in a place of pride. Suddenly, bare walls seem more like a home.

She remembers, staring at that rock, reading about children on Old Earth tossing rocks into the water. Or slapping rocks. No, no, they called it “skipping rocks” in the digibooks. She goes back the the stream, and spends three days learning that the flat, thin stones work the best. When her pebble skips four times, she punches the air.

She uses berries to make paint and draws flowers on her walls. She used to draw faces, but she still sees thousands of them at night, and the day is still free of their stares. She draws forget-me-nots and marigolds and the strange yellowish things that grow by the brook, and she’s proud when her finger paintings are almost lifelike.

Slowly, steadily, she wakes up. She wakes up from the chest heaving, sweat stained dreams, and calms. She wakes up from the survival mode her mind had retreated to, and begins to actually see the world. She wakes up, but refuses to be awake in any time but the present.

 

When Clarke trades her meat, her fingers brush Niylah’s hand.  Clarke’s body wakes up. She remembers what it is to burn from another’s touch. Then Niylah’s lips are on hers, and Clarke presses back, and for the first time, she doesn’t bite.

Niylah’s kisses travel lower, a trail of embers across Clarke’s skin. Clarke burns, and burns, and burns.

 

Later, Clarke wakes up dreaming, the stares haunting her still. But there is a body next to her, breathing, and Clarke times her breath to hers. She calms.

Clarke remembers one of the basic lessons of healing. Sometimes, fire doesn’t just kill. Sometimes, when the injuries are too urgent and the supplies lacking, it saves. The worst wounds are closed by cauterizing.

Clarke brushes her hand over Niylah’s shoulder and Niylah shifts slightly in her sleep. Clarke looks down at her, knows that theirs was the relationship of one night, another traveler’s body Niylah used to warm the night.

But Clarke is still thankful Niylah reminded her of what it is to play with fire. And she knows that soon, she must stop running and confront the one who has wounded her. The only one who truly sets her alight.

But there is time still. And some wounds take a long time to heal.

 

Clarke slips out of Niylah’s bed with a murmured goodbye. She sets out alone into the brilliant, blazing, starlit night.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I was really inspired by the life Clarke had been living at the beginning of the premier, and I wanted to explore her mind a little bit, although I could never understand a character as complex and layered as her. Let me know what you think :)


End file.
